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297 Postscript My mother Billye, Dave White’s only child, died of cancer in March of 1995. She got a predictably nice, below-cost funeral from Phillips-Robinson, including a grand wake that could have passed for a Democratic party precinct meeting. The attending crowd reflected the modest sum of her life’s accomplishments, mainly the five children she’d raised and scads of political acquaintances— including both friends who’d come to mourn and enemies there for proof that she had indeed worked in her last election. Among the mourners were all the Robinsons themselves, including Garner’s first-born son,Gale,who’d raised his own family two blocks away from the house where I grew up. After paying his respects, Gale, who had inherited his mother’s alcoholism but had been on the wagon for several months, went out and got drunk. On his way home a few hours later, he lost control of the car he always drove like a bat out of hell, wrecked it, and was killed. My mother was seventy years old and Gale was sixty-three. Although Gale had been a frequent candidate for public office, neither his nor my mother’s life was marked by extraordinary accomplishment, nor had they been as interesting, eventful, or public as those of their fathers. That their deaths closed another generational chapter in the history of the Robinson-White family relationship and might be notable for the coincidence of their timing was significant only to those of us close enough to know.Yet their passing received unusual media attention. The newspapers gave each a long obituary and their names and pictures were on television repeatedly for one simple reason that in itself made them exceptional today. Billye and Gale were dedicated, full-time participants in the process of democracy. For them politics was a family obligation, a duty. My mother’s death was one of those long excruciating bouts Postscript James D. Squires 298 with lung cancer that had spread to the brain. Refusing to give in, she struggled for days, in and out of a dope stupor during which her children vainly tried to maintain communication. At one point to test her coherence, one of my brothers mentioned the name of Jim Roberson, her long-deceased best friend and fellow election warrior, in connection with the prospect of an approaching spring primary. The sound of “the Senator’s” name and the word “election” brought this bird-like, decrepit, and hairless figure straight up in her bed. “Well, tell him to get me the voter list so we can get started,” she declared, with new life in her eyes. “Tell me when we get the list.” Had Jim Roberson been alive to summon her into political battle, no doubt my mother would have tried to get up and get dressed. Love and appreciation of politics had been passed on to her and to Gale by their parents as surely as had my mother’s temper and Gale’s inability to cope with alcohol. And they in turn passed it on to their children. But with all due respect to the apocryphal suggestion that politics is somehow in the blood of the Scotch-Irish, this is not an inherited trait. It is learned behavior, a family value. Of all the things my mother expected of me, few were higher on her priority list than involvement. And of all the things she taught me, none was more often stressed than the three-way relationship of freedom, independence, and the election process. “In this country whoever gets the most votes gets to decide things,” she told me when I was a child barely old enough to understand. “Even if you don’t get the most votes and lose, you can still have a say and influence how things turn out. And there is always another election just around the corner.But if you don’t participate and speak up, you won’t even have the right to complain.” If money was needed to be involved in twentieth-century democracy, or if it required exceptional intelligence or television celebrity, the Whites and the Robinsons would never have been participants. But in those days it did not. And fortunately we were rich in what for the time and place was the most valuable currency of politics, that precious and vanishing gold that has been correctly termed the most democratic of all virtues—fraternity. ...

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